Human nature does not seem to change its general make-up in the course of a few thousand years. Men have learned self-control and self-determination. They have built up an environment of social institutions into which their successors have been born. But the fundamental problems which the men of the New Testament times faced were very similar to those which we face. Of course they had different apparatus for question and answer. They lacked much knowledge of nature which we have, and of course they lacked all knowledge of the history which followed them. Bui whoever read the autograph letters of Paul would sympathize with our efforts to apply his principles to our own conditions.

In the teaching of Jesus there is no formal conception of a church. It is common knowledge that the word is used only twice in the Gospels and then in the Greek version of Matthew. This is what we should expect on account of the supreme emphasis on the Kingdom in the life of Jesus. On the other hand when we get as far in the Christian history as Augustine’s City of God, we have a rather formal conception of the church as a static institution into which are gathered the faithful of all ages. And since that time it has been hard for the popular thought of Christendom to get away from the idea of an ark of safety or a permanent institution which is provided to shelter souls.

The teaching of Ephesians about the church stands halfway between these two conceptions. Christians are thought of dynamically as a growing body, or the evolutionary instrument by which the Messiah produces a new structure of humanity. But the church is not merely a preparatory body. It finally merges into that humanity itself and is in this sense a permanent institution.

It should be understood that in the mind of the author of this epistle the church is merely an indication of a great movement in the cosmic scheme of the ages. According to the tenth verse of the first chapter we are entering upon a new period in God’s government of his household called the fulness of the times or the denouement of history. He is engaged in bringing back to himself the loyalty of the entire universe in such a way that it shall be unified under the Messiah as head. But this Messiah is not merely the Jew’s Messiah. He has become the Gentile Messiah through Paul’s ministry. He is universalized. His resurrection is thought of accordingly as the first decisive step in a great process. Just as Peter and the author of Hebrews, in fact, Jesus himself, quote the words, “ Sit thou on my right hand until I make thine enemies thy footstool,” so the author of Ephesians conceives the work of God in the present era to be the subduing of all creation to Christ. Furthermore the Messiah is God’s fulness, that is, the manifestation of the abundant riches of the Godhead toward all creation. By the pierced hand the beauty of all the world receives its finishing touch. It is only by a curious slip of attention in reading the long sentence in which the first chapter of Ephesians closes that commentators have failed to notice that it is not the church but Christ which stands in apposition with the great closing phrase— “the fulness of him that filleth all in all.” Parallel usage in Colossians is enough to establish this interpretation.

Now the universalizing of the Messiah was an idea that filled this author with enthusiasm so intense that he calls it his secret or mystery. It will be noted that we are relying entirely upon biblical usage to translate “secret” rather than “mystery” or “religion.” It was only overpowering grace by which this author, who is evidently Paul—who else would call himself less than the least of all saints? is enabled to preach unto Gentiles the unsearchable riches of this Messiah. For the universalization of the Messiah includes a universal conception of his prepared people. And the fascinating thing about this secret is that the “ Gentiles are fellow-heirs, fellow-members of the body, and fellow partakers of the promise fulfilled in Messiah Jesus.”

The use of the word “inheritance” in the first chapter, the passage just quoted in the third, and the insistence in the second chapter on the welding together of both Jews and Gentiles into the commonwealth and temple of God make it evident that Paul thinks of the church in this era as taking the place of the people of Israel in the Old Testament prophecies. This is inferred first by the fact that ecclesia is adopted from the use of the word in the Septuagint to represent the congregation of Israel. It is significant that Stephen is the first Christian preacher to use the word ecclesia and he uses it of the congregation of Israel. It is significant because it was Stephen who preceded Paul in universalizing Christianity and because the word is applied to the Christian church first in that passage of Acts that refers to his persecution. And so, after the death of Stephen in which Saul took such a prominent part, the body of disciples solidified under the blows of that persecutor; and when he was converted it was seen to be the genuine Israel. Hence the bated breath and awful depression of those words, “ I persecuted the church of God.”

That the church possesses a place previously retained for Israel (“The servant of Jehovah,” “A diadem of beauty in the hand of thy God”) is also evident from the first chapter. The thought in Ephesians brings itself here into harmony with the presuppositions of the Acts and of the Gospels. That the Messiah cannot come without the preparation of the people, for instance through John the Baptist, is taken for granted. In the re-creation of the universe under Christ, then, the church holds this peculiar place and privilege. It is the Messiah’s personal estate, the body through which he acts and speaks. It is the commonwealth of true Israel, the temple or headquarters of God, the cross-section of the entire development of the new humanity. Paul was probably aware that others besides himself, for instance the Stoics of his own city, conceived a great future for a unified humanity, but whether he was so aware or not this conception is one that satisfies the most high-minded cosmopolitan. To use the phrase of Dr. Simon N. Patten, “the blending of all social aspirations is only a matter of time.” We have here the thought of the evolution of the Messiah’s people into a grand reconstruction of humanity, not merely the melting-pot of the races, but their actual formation into a new structure.

The fulness of God administered in the Messiah to all creation is felt first of all in that inward experience of faith mentioned in the third chapter in connection with the comprehension of the love of God on the part of the individual. It is finally mentioned in the fourth chapter in connection with the goal of this cosmic process. The body is to go on building itself up and gathering in all suitable material for growth until all come “in the oneness of our faith into a full-grown humanity, to that stature which is measured only by this fulness that there is in the Messiah.” Robinson in his commentary quotes Tennyson in the Death of Oenone and Other Poems:

Man as yet is being made, and ere the crowning age of ages

Shall not aeon after aeon pass and touch him into shape?

All about him shadow still, but while the races flower and fade.

Prophet eyes may catch a glory slowly gaining on the shade,

Till the peoples all are one and all their voices blend in choric

Hallelujah to the Maker; “It is finished. Man is made.”

It is worth remarking that the entire thought of the church here is quite free from sacramentarianism. It is true that baptism is mentioned in the epistle, but the great emphasis lies elsewhere. The process depends at each point on apparatus such as the following:

The word of truth

The gospel of your salvation

The truth as it is in Jesus

The sword of the spirit which is the word of God

The breastplate of righteousness

The preparation of the gospel of peace

The filling with the Spirit Prophets, apostles, evangelists, pastor-teachers.

These last are given to the church “with a view to a full equipment of saints toward their work of ministering, toward the building up of the body of the Messiah.” In fact did not Paul himself, exalted as he was by the joy of delivering a great message, do yet more for the Messiah by giving him a body, a social group by which the representative man propagates his life in the world?

Most of all should it be insisted on that we have nowhere in this epistle any room for a church invisible. Here is a visible church, militant in a real world. It is a church that must prove the superiority of its life by achieving a higher morality in practical affairs than would otherwise be possible. The individuals live in the future and their conduct is that of the coming Kingdom. It is contrasted with the world about it as a blaze of light is contrasted with darkness. What a challenge to the Christian church of today! The preaching of social ethics in our present-day situation certainly needs the visible support of a group of people working out Christian morality in the modem crisis.

But if it is a visible church there must be a visible unity. The church invisible can never function as God’s temple in the world; that is to say, as God’s headquarters, or as the Messiah’s body. Nor will it draw into it the energy and devotion of those forward-looking people who are now outside the church. And yet on every hand there is a cry rising for an instrument of social progress on which all can unite who look for the redemption of the world. Bishop Williams in his writings such as, The Christian Ministry and Social Problems, frequently says what many others have felt, that social reformers generally are on the hunt for a new faith. Of course, we must realize that no faith is worth anything unless it is embodied in some kind of social organization. More than ever before we need the one visible church. In fact, are we not in the same sort of a world as that in which this epistle was written, a world full of vague expression, unfettered thought, various religious currents competing with one another, incipient social groups giving birth to great social hopes? And to the author of the epistle this was the very situation calling for unity. Lack of unity was as undesirable as a plurality of Gods or of Messiahs. Indeed, you cannot trust the individual to work out for himself the kind of socialized character required. Even this process is inseparable from the body and that which every joint supplieth. The body is not merely being built, it is building itself in the medium of love.

And yet more insistent than the call for unity is the demand that the church realize a higher stage on its way to be filled with the fulness that streams from the exalted Jesus. To Peter the exaltation of the Messiah meant one thing, to Paul something slightly different, and, in its way, something grander. To us Jesus is exalted when we set him in his true historical position of strategic influence on the social progress of mankind. In a very real sense it is true today that more diverse sorts of men can march forward and acclaim his leadership than ever. Great outward organizations like an Interchurch World Movement we certainly do need; but we also need in addition to be building up an inner life, not an individual kind of life, but an inner intimate, mystic socializing of souls. What Mazzini’s Young Italy was to Italy united and freed, what the clubs were to the French Revolution, what Robinson’s congregation in Holland was to the founding of a New England, that will these elementary groupings of the church be to the “new world” of which we are all now writing and speaking. In the future we may still be diverse. Let us hope however that our diversity may not be grounded on dead denominational issues, but on the realization of separate functions. Let those that fear the Lord and cherish the new social hope speak often one to another.